What I’d Love to See in Notes 9.0 February 2, 2009
Posted by Glenn Irvine in Blog, Advocacy, Futuring.Tags: Account Switching, Collaborative View, Futures, Glenn Irvine, Lotus Notes, Lotusphere 2009, Presentation
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I was having a browse through Ed Brill’s presentation on the Lotus Notes Roadmap at Lotusphere last month (See the presentation below), and this prompted me to consider some of the things I’d like to see in the next edition of Notes.
1. Account/Role Switching
If there is one thing I especially would like to see, it would be an equivalent to Outlook’s multiple account capability.
i.e. That magic little button under the send button (too close to it if you ask me), that allows you to switch accounts, or essentially, your role/identity.
I have a number of roles in my professional life, whether it is my Business Development role at Eos, or as an Association Secretary, or a personal address, or as an instructor at my Karate club, or even as author of this Blog.
Whichever role I need to send an email from, can be achieved using this feature. Not only to switch the “sent from/reply to” address, but to switch signatures in-situ in the body of the email. Very handy.
Currently in Notes, to do this I need to copy-paste a signature, and then you are stuck with the one ”sent from” or “reply to” address.
This would be the first significant change. It is extremely useful. And I am sure I am not the only person out there with these multiple roles in their life.
The other thing I would like to see is…
Well actually, if the Account switching was sorted, I’d be happy for now :)
And that makes it a little easier to advocate for the change don’t you think…
Here’s Ed’s Presentation from Lotusphere.
Regards,
Glenn Irvine
glenn.irvine@collaborativeview.com
What disturbs me a bit about the content (but sometimes only the title) of posts like this is that all too often they’re restricted to talking about desired enhancements in apps bundled up with Notes. Often the comments are restricted to Notes Mail (as in your case above, Glenn) — or to iNotes or SameTime or one of the other IBM apps.
Understandably, IBM people (like our famous and most gentlemanly leader Ed Brill) often talk about specific enhancements in their own apps. Hey, I worked for IBM for a long time, and know that it’s hard enough to keep up with what IBM is announcing much less what happens outside IBM.
Many of the vast community of IBM business partners and independent ISVs, not to mention all those thousands of Notes customers big and small alike who roll their own apps (and some of whom have a vast inventory of such apps), do like what they see being added to or fixed in in Notes Mail.
But in many cases they also want major new generic enhancements in Notes. A perfect example of this would be the grouse new Xpages capability that’s just been released in Notes 8.5 for us all to savor.
Notes remains a fantastic application platform [for certain classes of apps] as we all know. While there have been many outstanding mainly server-related enhancements in the past few years (major compression improvements, DAOS, etc) it’s not quite as common for a startling application-building enhancement like Xpages to appear.
So what would I myself talk about when I say I’d like to see something new in Notes 9 or Notes 10?
How about a few REALLY big hitters, for generic app design and development? For one, the ability to design an application once and have it behave exactly the same in the Notes client and a web browser? (Not asking for much, am I?)
IBM in an earlier release used to make available what I’ll term “some trusty old Lotus Notes applications” which you’ll find listed here on my website: http://asiapac.com.au/Links/NotesDomino.htm#TRUSTY_OLD_LOTUS_NOTES_APPLICATIONS
They’re quite old and rusty pre-Domino apps (so are not web enabled), but my point here is that one thing they did at that point in time was to let people see that Notes is note just about mail (as important as mail still is), but that Notes is really very good for building a vast range of other application types.
The old hands at Notes (customers and others) were very worried that IBM had lost its way in the early part of this decade, but needn’t worry now since it’s apparent that IBM is solidly behind Lotus Software including Notes.
A recent extremely promising move from IBM is the decision to get behind OpenNTF.org and help push out the message that Notes is a great application platform, and that there are lots of free apps available from OpenNTF (and from a range other sources too, for that matter)
In summary, what I would have called this post is “What I’d Love to See in Notes 9.0 Mail” because there are LOTS of other bigger things I’d like to see in Notes 9 (and 10 and 11 and ad infinitum) as a whole!
The Feature exists since notes 3?
I Dont know exactly but more then 10 years for shure.
You just need do create ich Role as an Location and switch the Location
when you switch your function.
Every things works perfect with that.
- Signature
- Mail-Adress
- Rules
- Mail-Documents
- User which can see the mails ….
So my Question – what is the problem?